When Maryn McKenna wrote for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution several years ago, she covered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and was supposedly known in the newsroom as Scary Disease Girl. Or so she writes in the introduction to her new book, “Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA” (Free Press/Simon & Schuster). I was her newspaper colleague back then, and I never heard her called that. But it fits.
McKenna is now a respected independent science journalist, and her latest book has brought her wide and deserved acclaim, including a lengthy interview on public radio’s “Fresh Air.” The bug in her ...
A young man leaves his humdrum life in the real world to enroll in a school for magicians, where he learns spell casting and has many adventures. But the protagonist of Lev Grossman’s fantasy novel “The Magicians” enjoys drugs and sex and carries a jaded, disaffected attitude that is the very antithesis of Harry Potter. Quentin Coldwater is sometimes more like Holden Caulfield with superpowers, which, when you think about it, is a pretty scary proposition.
“The Magicians” is the latest you-gotta-read-this, pass-around book for fantasy fans who want something a little edgier than the popular young adult titles. And Grossman ...
The Decatur Book Festival is doing what Oprah Winfrey couldn’t: getting novelist Jothanan Franzen to talk. Billed as the largest independent book festival in the country, the DBF kicks off its fifth year Friday, September 3, with a keynote address by Franzen, followed by a weekend teeming with author appearances, music, theater, poetry readings, kid stuff, fast food and fun crowds, all milling throughout the little Atlanta suburb that’s part Mayberry, part Berkeley.
Franzen, author of the acclaimed “The Corrections” and the new “Freedom,” arguably the most anticipated literary novel of 2010, isn't quite in Thomas Pynchon’s realm of reclusiveness, but he’s ...
Nazis as villains and nuns singing choral / Cute kids and goatherds and fresh mountain laurel …
These are a few of our favorite things, for those of us who are fans of “The Sound of Music.” With some of the greatest songs written for the American musical theater, a timeless plot and wonderful family appeal, it’s hard to mess up this classic. The production that opened last night at Atlanta's Fox Theatre, and runs through August 29 as part of the Theater of the Stars series, doesn’t quite mess it up, but it rarely rises to the level we expect from major shows ...
To fans of the late John Kennedy Toole’s great Southern comic novel “A Confederacy of Dunces,” Ignatius J. Reilly needs no introduction. He is, as Walker Percy put it memorably in his foreword, a “slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one … with his thunderous contempt and one-man war against everybody.”
For 30 years, Reilly has lived only on the page, as Hollywood has dithered through an endless series of new ways not to make a movie. But now Atlanta theater audiences get a rare chance to watch Ignatius come to ...
The heck with Hamlet. An actor looking for a real challenge should turn to Don Lockwood. Not exactly a well-known name to even true theater buffs, Don is the dancin’ fool brought to life by Gene Kelly in the classic 1952 movie musical “Singin’ in the Rain.”
So when Justin Tanner steps on stage in Aurora Theatre’s thoroughly enjoyable new production of “Singin’ in the Rain” -- playing through September 5 -- he not only has to perform a lengthy soft shoe on what looks like a dangerously wet stage, he has to make us believe that he isn’t just a Gene ...
